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16 Crime Media Culture 3 (2020)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre16 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Crime Media Culture - g 2020, Vol. 1 6(1) 3-5 Editors' Introduction The Author(s)12020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1741659020906284 journals.sagepub.com/home/cmc Sarah Armstrong OSAGE University of Glasgow, Scotland Katherine Biber University of Technology Sydney, Australia Travis Linnemann Kansas State University, USA As a wildfire of apocalyptic scale engulfed Australia during the long summer of 2019-2020, the term 'omnicide' began to circulate in panicked public discourse. Huge swathes of the landscape were consumed by the fire, devastating more than half of the World Heritage listed Gondwana rainforests, the most expansive subtropical rainforests in the world, parts of which were more than 40 million years old. Firefighters and residents died, thousands of people fled to beaches and waded into the water to escape the blaze, one billion animals were burned alive, Indigenous ancestral sites were destroyed and entire ecosystems and species pushed closer to the brink of extinction. As most of Australia's population was struggling to breathe, its political leaders were peddling misinformation, pointing to false causes of the fires - arsonists, environmentalists, scien- tists - to deflect attention from clear evidence of their culpability. Scarce water resources which had been privatized and sold, compounded the long-term drought, which in turn, fueled the fires' intensity. The gravity and intensity of the fires had been predicted, planning and infrastructure had been refused, firefighting funds had been withdrawn, all the while, government subsidies to a bloated fossil fuel industry continued. The interests of extractive industries had, yet again, sup- planted those of the public and environment. Australia has one of the world's most concentrated media markets, over half of which is dominated by News Corporation and other Murdoch owned entities. Even those not controlled by News Corporation, seemingly followed suit, denying and distracting from the causes of the catastrophe. In her widely circulated essay, Danielle Celermajer (2020), an Australian scholar of multi-spe- cies justice, wrote about 'omnicide'. Initially, a term associated with nuclear warfare, in recent years it has come to be associated with anthropogenic ecological catastrophe. Whereas Raphael Lemkin coined the term 'genocide' in 1944 to describe - and criminalize - the intentional destruc- tion of a national, religious or ethnic group, omnicide refers to the killing of everything. In Celermajer's use, omnicide is a crime which demands new understandings of criminal culpability and accountability. Such a view would draw definite links between the malice and negligence of political leaders, the avarice of corporate elites and those in the news media who provide cover for the whole project. The tragic point made by the Australian wildfire and the obvious efforts to

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